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An Assassination in Pakistan

The photograph of Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, Punjab Governor Salman Taseer’s accused assassin, credited to photographer Sabir Khan, is a chilling snapshot of where thirty years of state-sponsored Islamism has dragged Pakistan. Qadri’s full beard and trimmed mustache, a cultural adaptation of certain Islamic conservatives, would have been uncommon among the armed and authorized police guards of a secular-minded Pakistani governor a generation ago. The expression on Qadri’s face in the moments after his arrest seems to be one of self-satisfaction—certainly not a portrait of anxiety or distress.

Taseer’s death will shock many Pakistanis; like Benazir Bhutto’s killing, it is a little-needed reminder to the country’s internationally minded elites that they are as vulnerable as the rest of Pakistan’s citizenry to the virus of revolutionary violence now afoot. Taseer was a flawed machine politician, but also a brave and ardent defender of the Pakistan People’s Party’s vision of a modernizing and more culturally balanced Pakistan. The political act that cost him his life involved his defense of progressive amendments to the country’s retrograde blasphemy laws. According to the BBC, he issued this Twitter message on December 31: “I was under huge pressure sure 2 cow down b4 rightist pressure on blasphemy. Refused. Even if I’m the last man standing.”

In its character and details, the assassination recalls the killing of India’s Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards at the tail end of Indian Punjab’s Sikh separatist insurgency. At a certain point the violence of insurgency and counterinsurgency among people sharing language, geography, faith, and culture becomes so intimate that it is no longer possible to reliably vet friends from foes.

Pakistan’s Personnel Reliability Programs, as they are known in the nuclear security trade, involve not only evaluating the suitability of bodyguards for governors but also the management of the country’s swelling stockpile of fissile materials and nuclear bombs. Taseer’s betrayal should give pause to those officials in Washington who seem regularly to express complacency, or at least satisfaction, about the security of Pakistan’s arsenal.

Photograph: Sabir Khan

Steve Coll, a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and reports on issues of intelligence and national security in the United States and abroad.